2016-09-05. Climate change test doesn’t make for greener Earth.

posted Sep 7, 2016, 10:24 PM by Alan Gould

By Associated Press. For GSS Climate Change chapter 8. Excerpt: LOS ANGELES — In the course of a 17-year experiment on more than 1 million plants, scientists put future global warming to a real world test — growing California flowers and grasslands with extra heat, carbon dioxide and nitrogen to mimic a not-so-distant, hotter future. The results, simulating a post-2050 world, aren’t pretty. And they contradict those who insist that because plants like carbon dioxide — the main heat-trapping gas spewed by the burning of fossil fuels — climate change isn’t so bad, and will result in a greener Earth. At least in the California ecosystem, the plants that received extra carbon dioxide, as well as those that got extra warmth, didn’t grow more or get greener. They also didn’t remove the pollution and store more of it in the soil, said study author Chris Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. Plant growth tended to decline with rising temperatures. ...It’s not just plants that will suffer in a hotter world. Biologists have warned that about 20 percent of the world’s lizard species could go extinct by 2080 if current warming trends continue.... http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Climate-change-test-doesn-t-make-for-greener-9204104.php